Nevermind, the header of the file says it's an apache project, so I'll contact them. Though, if anyone else is running PHP and is worried about dropped connections thrashing their server, apply this patch :-)

I think I found a bug in the cassandra PHP client. I'm using phpcassa, but the bug is in thrift itself, which I think that library phpcassa just wraps. In any case, I was trying to test on my local machine, which has limited RAM, so I reduced the JVM heap size. Of course I immediately had an OOM causing my local cassandra server to crash, but that caused my unit tests to stall at 100% CPU, which seemed weird to me. I had to figure out why. It seems that TSocket doesn't test for EOF (it's only checking for a socket timeout), causing a tight infinite loop when the connection disappears. Checking for EOF in an else if seems like an easy fix, but given how deep this code is in the library I'll leave it to the experts.